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ScanSafe issues critical infrastructure warning

Vendor's annual threat report warns of sustained attacks on sectors such as
energy and oil

Cyber criminals are targeting critical operations such as energy supply

Critical infrastructure organisations are more than twice as likely to suffer
from cyber attacks than other organisations, according to the latest annual
threat report from security-as-a-service vendor ScanSafe released today.

The report was compiled from an analysis of more than a trillion web requests
processed by the firm last year, and found that organisations in energy and oil,
pharmaceutical and chemical, government, and banking and finance are most at
risk from data theft Trojans.

"There is a misconception that cyber criminals are only intent on stealing
data intended for credit card fraud and identity theft. In reality, cyber
criminals are casting a much wider net," said Mary Landesman, senior security
researcher at ScanSafe.

"Consumer credit card details are child's play compared to the value of
infrastructure and intellectual data from these sensitive verticals. The message
is clear: cyber war is already here. The web is the battlefield and the
enterprise is on the frontline."

There is increasing anxiety in the security industry about the potential for
attacks to severely disrupt critical infrastructures.

Security giant McAfee
recently
surveyed over 600 professionals responsible for critical infrastructure
protection, and found that a third had actually suffered large-scale distributed
denial-of-service attacks several times a month, most of which had an impact on
operations.

The ScanSafe report also revealed that web-based malware doubled over the
past 12 months, from an average of eight web malware encounters per organisation
per day to 19.

Twenty-three per cent of those encounters were with zero-day malware, and 19
per cent were direct encounters with data theft Trojans, according to ScanSafe.

"Our defences must extend beyond the confines of bricks and mortar and into
the cloud to ensure end-to-end protection of our most sensitive assets and
people, regardless of operating system, device or location," said Landesman.